Quake (60 page)

Carter watched a wall of trees rushing towards him and the hackles rose on the back of his neck.

Whining in protest, the throttled-back engines kicked the fighter’s speed down by degrees. Carter’s sweat dripped into his eyes as the trail narrowed. He fought the weaving plane and watched the trees, a swathe of wide-boled oaks, growing ever closer.

The MiG slammed to a halt scant metres from the trees and there came a soft whine of exhaust. Carter lifted the cockpit canopy, worked his way down the first few rungs of the alloy ladder recessed in the fuselage and then leapt the final twelve feet to the ground.

He stared up at the dull grey flanks, sucking in the cold Austrian air. His breath emerged as smoke and he grinned, ears hammering, head pounding, eyes watering, and rolled his neck to ease the tension. Thought I was going through the mincer, he mused, and took a few steps back, his field of view widening ...

Austria opened up before him.

Beautiful and serene.

A wide valley lay scattered with evergreens, undulating away and then sloping violently upwards towards and into the Niedere Tauern Alps. The mountains created a huge tunnel in front of Carter’s awe-struck gaze, a giant’s tunnel. The walls were sheer, unforgiving, blue-grey and wholly dominant, oak and pine scattered the lower slopes and Carter could make out a few distant streams and wider waterways. A couple of narrow roads and trails zigzagged off to Carter’s left, and he moved quickly beneath the wall of trees as he checked his ECube.

Blue digits glowed softly.

Carter matched the coordinates and realised that he was four kilometres from the bug planted in Durell’s helicopter. He relayed the coordinates back to Mongrel and then, as an afterthought, to Spiral, with a short encoded digital transcript:

Have found Durell vb447. Will attempt to halt his insanity.

By whatever means. Coordinates to follow.

Request immediate back-up.

Carter attached his vb codes and the coordinates, and sent the blip on the WarChannel. He had no idea if the channels and the ECubes had been compromised by the Nex - they had done it successfully once before. Carter had to assume the worst: a total digital breakdown.

Carter had to assume he was on his own.

He took a deep cold breath, checked his weapons, and looked up through the trees. How many Nex between me and Jam? he thought. How many Nex between gaining the Avelach and finding Durell? And getting the fuck out alive?

Carter checked his pack, freshly stocked with ammo, grenades and HighJ explosive from when he had hastily dropped Mongrel at the Comanche. Then Carter checked himself, prodding warily at various bruised and battered parts of his flesh. Pulling free a PlasGrip™ bandage, he wound it tightly around one wrist and felt it pull tight, electronically adjusting to offer maximum support to injured limbs. He could still feel the staples pulling tight in his back where the bullet had entered, and before that where glass had sliced his flesh back in Switzerland. Reaching into the pack he popped five K5 combo painkillers and antibiotics, then pulled free a tiny vial. Taking the yellow safety tag from the needle, he injected his arm, needle slipping easily into the barely visible vein - felt the kick as the small slow-release capsule entered his circulatory system, being carried to lodge in his spinal column where it would effect a slow and steady release of chemicals. He would pay a high physiological price later ...

But that was later.

Carter sighed, gazing around at the cold woodland. A fresh breeze made the trees hiss and sigh, and chilled the
5
kin of his face. It was pleasant after the dry heat of Egypt, and he ran a blood-encrusted hand through his short hair, wondering how bad he looked: like a man who had been through the wars, probably.

Carter climbed wearily to his feet.

Nearly there, he thought.

One more burst, and then it will be over ...

One way or another.

Carter moved up through the woods, slowly at first but speeding up as the chemicals kicked in. When he reached the edge of the trees he monitored for Nex activity.

Nothing local, but hostiles swarmed over the coordinate target on his ECube.

Settling his back against a tree, and pulling the straps tight, Carter secured his Browning and M24. He began a slow, loping jog.

He followed the rough stony trail for a while, then cut across fields scattered generously with hornbeam, their leaves rustling. Carter paused beneath one, breathing heavy now, and rested his hand against the smooth grey bark. He could see something ahead, the top of a grey -almost black - crenellated tower peering over the nearest hill.

Carter continued, reaching the crest of the slope and dropping to one knee beside the bole of another tree, eyes scanning. The castle came into view, built into the side of the mountain. Jagged uneven ground, rocky and scattered with a few pines led steeply up to the vertical grey walls of the castle. A slightly offset central tower rose from within, capped with dark red tiles. Another narrower tower rose from this central edifice. To the right the structure was more square in shape, like a vast cube of black, whilst to the left, leading away from the mountain, it fell in a series of small circular towers, each rising to a black or red spire. The building looked ancient, and very, very strong. Built to resist an attacking force. Built to rain down fire on the enemy. Built to resist an invasion ...

A single wide dirt track swept up from the valley below, far to Carter’s left, zigzagging through heavy woodland which thinned as it reached the castle’s huge twin iron gates.

Carter could see a swarm of Nex activity by the gates, and up over the lower battlements he could make out more distant movement. His eyes narrowed, lips pursing in thought.

The whole castle was a massively imposing edifice, dominating the landscape below while in turn being overshadowed by the magnificence of the vast mountains behind it.

Carter checked his ECube.

Durell’s helicopter was there, somewhere in the castle.

Which meant that, logically, this was Durell’s centre of operations - the heart from which he was controlling the earthquakes.

And this was where Durell had the Avelach. Guarded by Jam, Carter’s oldest friend ...

‘
Let’s do it
,’ said Kade.

Carter said nothing.

He moved slowly, warily now that his target and destination was in sight. The temperature was dropping as he moved higher from the valleys and up the vast steep slopes before him. His calves burned and offered him yet more pain. Despite the drugs, Carter felt far from OK. He felt a million fucking miles from fit, healthy, and ready to take on the greatest of his enemies ...

‘The Avelach.’

The word sounded strange, spoken out loud. And it felt bad on his tongue, like Carter was pinning his tentative hopes for Natasha’s life on a machine that he did not understand, had never seen work, and that was the core of Durell’s Nex creation.

It sat badly with him.

Carter moved forward, slowly, carefully, continually scanning for the enemy. If they know I’m coming, he thought, I don’t want it to be because of carelessness. A disturbed bird, the crack of falling rock upon rock. Carter wandering aimlessly out into the open or silhouetting himself against a skyline like a shooting-range target ...

Carter took his time. Used his eyes, and occasionally his Sniper Scope, which clicked and whined softly as a magnified and digitally enhanced landscape, castle and Nex came into Carter’s field of vision. He noted the enemy’s pattern of movement, and watched as a patrol of four tanks and two trucks growled through the gates, heavy steel tracks grinding the stone trail to dust.

Carter worked slowly, coming in from the south with the mountains to his right and hugging them, their sheer vast walls, almost as if for protection. The landscape was slowly changing as he gained height, long grasses scattered with more and more huge rocks which gave him plenty of cover.

‘
They know you are coming
,’ said Kade smugly.

‘I don’t care.’

‘You’ll care when Jam shoots you in the face.’

The sun was toiling across the sky, plunging behind towering clouds that sent vast rolling shadows tumbling across the valleys. The cold wind blew stronger, ruffling Carter’s hair and chilling his fingers, nose and ears.

Reaching the base of the huge mound of rock on which the castle had been built, and with a sheer blue granite wall to his right, Carter started to clamber up the steep incline whose gradient steepened the further he went. Using his hands to help pull him forward, he found himself quickly sweating - sweat that was instantly chilled by the cold wind to leave him shivering almost uncontrollably.

A beautiful place, he thought.

But also a barren, deadly place.

A desolation.

After a half-hour of climbing, he reached the base of the castle wall. He crouched for a long time, searching for Nex, or cameras, or any other type of high-tech scanning devices. He could see nothing, and his ECube could see nothing ... but Carter found it hard to believe.

Still, he couldn’t exactly walk through the front gates.

He gazed up at the vast vertical expanse of stone ahead of him.

There were no windows, and no handholds that he could see.

Just stone ... stretching high above his tilted head like some vast plain of rock, a towering wall of smooth sheer impossibility.

Breath coming in plumes, Carter pulled free his Sp_drag, his Skimmer, and reaching up he allowed the tiny alloy jaws to chew into the stone. With the aid of this digital crampon, Carter began the long long climb up the vast grey-black bulwark.

The climb was protracted, incredibly treacherous and an act of insanity. Wind smashed against Carter as he climbed; slowly, deliberately he moved upwards, and within minutes his hands were numb with cold and pain. Sweat ran and then chilled him, and he pressed himself tight against the flat wall, a limpet against a stone with the waves of cold air washing in violent crests up and over him.

Carter felt awesomely vulnerable. Perhaps more vulnerable than at any moment during his life. All it would take was a helicopter to spot him, or a sniper to sight him ... and
bam.
Fish food. Dead meat.

Carter smiled grimly, and continued to climb.

Up, endlessly up, he travelled.

Carter did not look up. To do so might destroy his resolve, and so instead he focused on the grey wall to which he clung. The stone was rough, cold under his numb fingers. Pins and needles raced along his hands and arms, and cramps spiked his thighs and calves. The staples holding the bullet wound tight in his back moved and stretched his flesh, and he felt a little blood weep out, soaking into his torn battered dead Nex clothing.

Up, he climbed.

Eternally upwards.

Reaching for Heaven?

Or climbing to Hell in an ironic reversal?

Carter licked his lips, pausing, panting, and gazed out over the valley. He could hear distant noises, crashes and booms, the whines of engines and suddenly he brightened - when he realised that it sounded -
incredibly -
like Spiral TankSquad tanks being airlifted and fast-jetted to this location ... backup?

I fucking hope so, he thought.

Squinting through the cold light, Carter could see nothing through the swathes of lowland forest. Then he heard a distant rattling and watched forty Nex tanks trundle onto the trails sweeping down from the castle and speed off, engines roaring. Something big was going down.

Something heavy—

But Carter had his own problems.

He continued to climb, and at one point broke his own rule and glanced up. The summit was tantalisingly close and the Sp_drag continued to eat stone, tiny spiral trails of grey stone dust whirling away down the face of the sheer castle wall and then, when he thought his endurance had finally reached its pain-filled limits, thought he could go on no longer, his aggrieved and screaming hands grasped the edge of the parapet and he hauled himself up onto a low crenellation, squatted, eyes quickly skimming the area before him as he drew his Browning with stumps of numbness and clumsily flicked free the safety.

The wind howled, a soft moaning, blowing eerily through the castle.

Below him spread a broad platform of uneven and time-worn stone flags. It measured perhaps forty or fifty metres square, was bordered on the left by a high stone wall leading to a tower and whose only feature was a narrow arched doorway. Ahead squatted another battlement that dropped away to what Carter assumed was the castle’s central courtyard. To the right stood a high stone wall with three ancient doorways, all shrouded in gloom.

The sun disappeared behind towering black clouds. Carter glanced back at the dizzying fall, at the sheer wall he had ascended and the vast slopes beyond, dropping through to distant valleys. It was a fucking awesome drop.

Carter hopped down to the rough-worn stone flags and something moved in the shadows of the narrow doorway leading to the tower. Dropping to a crouch Carter sighted along the Browning’s barrel, finger tightening on the trigger and eyes narrowing as Jam stepped into view.